Content Management and Web Page Editing Tool

Central to our way of building web sites is our Content Management System Kea. Handcrafting a web site with a few pages is a task that most people can achieve with a little time and by learning a few simple skills. As a site grows however, it becomes increasingly necessary to use systems to manage the build process. Sharing the work of editing pages, centralising templates, managing the addition of files to the site, and other tasks all need to be brought together to prevent site maintenance from getting out of hand. We developed the Kea content management system to address these problems, and to scale up the job of web site development to the task of building sites of high quality.

Kea sits on a server separate to your public website. Only one login name and password is required between the Kea server and the live server, helping to keep the live server secure. Kea prefers to use a secure protocol (SSH) to 'talk' to the live server, but where this is not possible it can use FTP. Because Kea is publishing standard compliant HTML, your live server doesn't need to be anything special. We have Kea interacting with Solaris, Linux and NT servers although our preference is for a Unix environment.

All interaction with Kea is via a web-browser. This makes it very easy to roll-out, as no additional software is required other than a fairly modern (standards compliant) browser.

The Kea server manages users and their levels of access to the system. The system has two levels of users, with "junior" users able to make changes, but not publish (or trigger) them to the live site. The "senior" user/s are notified of changes, and can then go in and check the information either for accuracy, style or "code worthiness" before approving it.

Content Management

Kea comprises two key elements - a content management system (CMS), and a page editing tool. Below is a screen shot of the Kea file management screen. Here you can preview a page, edit the page, edit information about a page (Meta data) or if you have the correct privileges you can edit the actual HTML (source) of the file. This user has full Kea rights. Privileges can be limited to prevent users from being able to create folders, create new files, trigger, delete and move files, edit content, edit info and edit source, or any combination.

KEA Administration Screen

Kea features revision control and changes can be rolled back to reinstate previous versions of pages, folders or entire sites if necessary. It keeps a history of the users that have made changes to a page and these can be viewed by clicking on the name in the Modified By column.

Kea locks files when they are being edited to ensure that they are not subject to concurrent modifications.

The system has a simple templating approach. When making a new page you choose the template, and then start "filling in the blanks". Being able to edit the HTML however means that it's flexible and expandable. The system keeps a record of who has made changes, and only allows one person to make a change to a particular file at a time.

Page Editing

Kea has been designed so that even a novice web maintainer won't accidentally change the navigation or templates or "break" the site. It is excellent for editing existing text, and can be used to replace photographs or images. Any text that the user is allowed to edit is highlighted in blue, and clicking on the text brings up a box where they can change the text, format it and add simple HTML.

Kea Editing Screen

Your Specific Requirements

Kea has a structured menu system that is easily altered as required.  It also has some automatic menu and navigation systems available, including:

• Breadcrumbs which show the path through a site, (eg Home > About Council > Mayor > Mayor's Schedule)
• Main section navigation on all pages
• Sub section navigation which links to all the pages within an area

A backend database for content storage.

While Kea has a meta-database to manage all the pages on a site. It doesn't use a database to store the basic HTML and PDF files. This allows Kea to manage the pages effectively, but still publish "regular" HTML pages to the production server. We think that this has a number of advantages for sites that don't necessarily have homogenous content.

• You get "real" URLs - ie www.chbdc.govt.nz/council/ rather than www.chbdc.govt.nz/1234hjiiufsd?jeroiufd making them easier to publicise and remember.
• You don't have to be a programmer to change things - average HTML skills are all that's required to make significant changes to the structure of a site.
• Your production server can have a very simple set-up, leaving all the "trickery" behind the scenes on the Kea server.
• Kea is low risk - Because it is non-invasive you are able to easily "retrieve" your site should circumstances change and you wish to move to a new content management system in the future.
• You can use databases for the things that "need" databases, and not be constrained into developing a "database" site.
• The load on your production server is lower making pages faster to serve, and quicker for your visitors to download.
• You still get the advantages of a database driven site - consistent style, able to change templates, dynamic content that changes as soon as new content is added, without the restrictions and cost involved.
  If having your content entirely in a database is a "deal breaker" we could simply expand the Kea database to accommodate this requirement.

Ability to alter the look of the site through CMS controlled CSS Files

Because Kea publishes standard HTML this is very easy to do. Not only can you alter the CSS, but you can also alter the templates code, making new ones when new situations are encountered for example. This access to CSS and templates can be restricted to just the webmaster, but in some situations you may want others to be able to change the CSS for their bit of the site and this can be accommodated also.

Most of the restrictions around adding and deleting sections really stem from the flexibility of the template design. As long as the templates are built with this in mind, so that menus can expand and contract, and there are few, if any, images used for navigation labels, then there should be no problem adding and deleting areas and pages.

Ability to easily update remotely

One of the key strengths of Kea is that anyone, with appropriate passwords, can update the website from any internet connected PC or Macintosh. You can have people in remote rural offices who use the same system, as those in your head office. We have people in France, Germany, Canada and the USA using our Kea server here in Wellington to update their sites.

Be usable by non IT staff

Almost all current Kea users would consider themselves "non IT staff". Kea's focus is to help ordinary busy people maintain and expand their websites, in as safe and enjoyable a way as possible.

Usually staff will start out just editing existing pages, or adding simple structured content such as news items or events. They may not even be able to publish (or trigger) the pages to the live server, but instead a request goes to the administrator to check the items first. As they gain skill and confidence, they may be able to add new pages and sections, and even edit the source (HTML) of the page.

We are happy to facilitate your staff doing as much maintenance as possible themselves, and welcome all suggestions and feedback on how we could make that even easier